Controversial Historical Opinions You Have

[bookwyrm]

There wasn't direct contact I think, but I'm pretty sure there were long trade routes that just went through plenty of intermediaries as the coastal and Central American peoples in between, like Cassava/Manioc/Yuca was actively spreading up into the Oaxaca lowlands as of Cortes' expedition. They may have actually heard a couple wild rumors, more from Spanish activity before Pizarro's bid to seize Peru, but what the Inka didn't have was a body of actionable intelligence on the particulars of how Spanish Entradas worked, and having a latin alphabet wouldn't have at all helped there- cause they were in the middle of huuge plagues and a big civil war that only then got wrapped up like within the same year of Pizarro's landing. And on top of all that- ten years to spread from one Spanish conquistador and governor to another like-minded player in the forming Spanish colonial government is a lot less of an ask than getting either a written or oral account out of Mesoamerica, through the web of trade, and then actually translating it into Quechua from Nahuatl or Spanish or whatever.

And the really pernicious larger idea here was that the Inka were some child-like hermit kingdom unable to conceive of not just their empire falling and the world turning upside-down but like normal Machiavellian political calculus and military strategy? Which is nonsense because again, they just had a civil war, and were doing all sorts of normal empire things expanding Tawantinsuyu to reach as far south as the Mapuche resisting them, as far east into the mountainous interior as the Chachapoya still barely conquered, and as far north as the Quitu and Canari in Ecuador also still resisting or very recently and uncertainly conquered. Like within the same lifetimes of all the big players of the fall of the Inka as an empire recently.

It's like, does the great Viking raid on Lindisfarne indicate that the Saxons were all insular unprepared hermit kingdoms? Even if in another universe by demonic misfortune the King of Northumbra happened to also be right there in the middle of the raid, praying for his soul in murdering his cousin-king of East Anglia, and events dramatically spiraled into the early immediate imposition of the Danelaw?

 

[Simon_Jester]

Except that's the whole issue with the methodology of GG&S. By initially making an assumption ("why") and looking at evidence backwards from said assumption in order to find a just-so story, the book falls victim to confirmation bias and ends up forcing facts to fit a hypothesis implicitly assumed to be true. In all fairness to Diamond, he isn't the only person to do this, Sapiens being the other example coming to mind.

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Well, like I said, I'm not saying Diamond is the guy to go to for the answers, but I'm not mad about the question.

Asking "what touched off the sequence of events that led to this particular continent becoming weirdly able to reach out and dominate other continents" is not an unreasonable question. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying anything about the merits of Diamond's analysis.

I think you misunderstood - or maybe I just explained badly. Have you considered how slow it would be to get from Mexico to Chile if the best you can do is runners on foot and maybe a non-seaworthy canoe here and there?

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Yeah. Hiking from Mexico to Chile could take, oh, a few months. Maybe several months.

The time lag between Cortez and Pizarro's (first) expedition was nine years. Pizarro wasn't just sitting around in Panama City in 1519 waiting for word to launch a conquest expedition against an empire I'm not sure he knew existed. And for that matter, that was Pizarro's first expedition, not his second and later one that actually did all the invading and smashing.

You're not wrong to observe that there were no lines of communication between Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, but that's really the sole center of the thing I'm thinking about here. Would have been nice if there had been, is all I'm saying.

 

[Artificial Girl]

There wasn't direct contact I think, but I'm pretty sure there were long trade routes that just went through plenty of intermediaries as the coastal and Central American peoples in between, like Cassava/Manioc/Yuca was actively spreading up into the Oaxaca lowlands as of Cortes' expedition. They may have actually heard a couple wild rumors, more from Spanish activity before Pizarro's bid to seize Peru, but what the Inka didn't have was a body of actionable intelligence on the particulars of how Spanish Entradas worked, and having a latin alphabet wouldn't have at all helped there- cause they were in the middle of huuge plagues and a big civil war that only then got wrapped up like within the same year of Pizarro's landing. And on top of all that- ten years to spread from one Spanish conquistador and governor to another like-minded player in the forming Spanish colonial government is a lot less of an ask than getting either a written or oral account out of Mesoamerica, through the web of trade, and then actually translating it into Quechua from Nahuatl or Spanish or whatever.

And the really pernicious larger idea here was that the Inka were some child-like hermit kingdom unable to conceive of not just their empire falling and the world turning upside-down but like normal Machiavellian political calculus and military strategy? Which is nonsense because again, they just had a civil war, and were doing all sorts of normal empire things expanding Tawantinsuyu to reach as far south as the Mapuche resisting them, as far east into the mountainous interior as the Chachapoya still barely conquered, and as far north as the Quitu and Canari in Ecuador also still resisting or very recently and uncertainly conquered. Like within the same lifetimes of all the big players of the fall of the Inka as an empire recently.

It's like, does the great Viking raid on Lindisfarne indicate that the Saxons were all insular unprepared hermit kingdoms? Even if in another universe by demonic misfortune the King of Northumbra happened to also be right there in the middle of the raid, praying for his soul in murdering his cousin-king of East Anglia, and events dramatically spiraled into the early immediate imposition of the Danelaw?

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There's actually an excellent essay about Mesoamerican bronze workers on this very website that touches on the trade network between Mexico and South America iirc.

 

[Shane_357]

Understandable. I suppose I just don't see social development and tool development as being in lockstep; there is no reason obvious to me why you can't get an agricultural revolution or a merchant-capitalism boom in an economy with no iron working.

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The issue here imo is that you exist in a context where these things have been directly and intentionally linked for centuries for political purposes in demeaning societies that the hegemon wants to subjugate and destroy. You don't even need 'Age', which is the core problem here (the idea of 'linear Ages' used to support the claim that Europe needed to exploit 'uplift' 'lesser' societies), just say 'bronze-dominant metallurgy' or similar and everyone knows what you mean.

Assuming, of course, that the existing tools- not so much the weapons of war but the tools- are a satisfactory substitute for iron. I'm a bit unclear on how that worked out for the Mesoamericans. Medieval European farmers didn't use a lot of iron, but where they did use it, it was pretty helpful, and many of those applications were for things obsidian doesn't seem like it'd help for.

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Turns out if you don't manage to ratfuck your oral transmission of lithic technologies (not just obsidian), there's plenty specialised stuff in that field that can do a lot of what bronze can't.

 

[Simon_Jester]

And the really pernicious larger idea here was that the Inka were some child-like hermit kingdom unable to conceive of not just their empire falling and the world turning upside-down but like normal Machiavellian political calculus and military strategy? Which is nonsense because again, they just had a civil war, and were doing all sorts of normal empire things expanding Tawantinsuyu to reach as far south as the Mapuche resisting them, as far east into the mountainous interior as the Chachapoya still barely conquered, and as far north as the Quitu and Canari in Ecuador also still resisting or very recently and uncertainly conquered. Like within the same lifetimes of all the big players of the fall of the Inka as an empire recently.

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In all fairness, the Roman Empire, generally regarded to be 'big boys' if ever there were any, did exhibit a tendency like this near the end. I've heard it commented by people well read in the primary sources that late Roman aristocrats in the Western Empire in the mid-400s, as the Empire was literally coming apart, often seemed surprisingly convinced that it couldn't possibly be collapsing, and thus concerned with their position in it or with rivals within its structure even as outside powers were kicking it down around their ears.

So it would hardly speak worse of the Inca to have the same problem than it does of all sorts of other historical empires and polities.

One of the ways that people 'orientalize' or otherwise denigrate 'exotic' societies is by pointing to things that the 'exotic' people did and saying "oh, how foolish and weak they were,' when in fact they were doing more or less the same thing. To talk about the human sacrifices being killed to appease the gods in Tenochtitlan, but to not talk about the public executions being held before cheering crowds in London and Paris and Madrid, for another example.

And I think denying that Mistakes Were Made is exactly the wrong tack to take here. But that's me.

The issue here imo is that you exist in a context where these things have been directly and intentionally linked for centuries for political purposes in demeaning societies that the hegemon wants to subjugate and destroy. You don't even need 'Age', which is the core problem here (the idea of 'linear Ages' used to support the claim that Europe needed to exploit 'uplift' 'lesser' societies), just say 'bronze-dominant metallurgy' or similar and everyone knows what you mean.

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[shrugs]

All right, I'm going to be candid about this one.

Sometimes, it seems very arbitrary to me which terms need to be reinvented from scratch in longer and more awkward-to-memorize forms to avoid the baggage someone else put on them, and which ones don't. Keeping track is, sometimes, tiresome. There are things where the insulting and prejudicial character is genuine, innate, and baked into the words themselves ("oriental despotism"), but there are also things where... I really don't think it is. I think that sometimes, trying to track down and kill vocabulary for the crimes old and often dead men committed with the same words on their lips becomes a losing game, and bad for our ability to communicate meaningfully.

It's worth doing sometimes. Not always.

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Besides, people already complain that I pad things out with jargon sometimes. The more I have to call a shovel a 'spatulate manual earthmoving implement' to avoid some overzealous soul looking for reactionary ignoramuses to blast, the worse it's going to get.

Turns out if you don't manage to ratfuck your oral transmission of lithic technologies (not just obsidian), there's plenty specialised stuff in that field that can do a lot of what bronze can't.

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I would be sincerely interested to learn more about that.

 

[BalerionTheDrake]

You don't even need 'Age', which is the core problem here (the idea of 'linear Ages' used to support the claim that Europe needed to exploit 'uplift' 'lesser' societies), just say 'bronze-dominant metallurgy' or similar and everyone knows what you mean.

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Weird stretch.

Age - the length of time that a person has lived or a thing has existed. Oxford Dictionary.

There comes a time when bronze is no longer the main metal being used by a society, so it is perfectly logical to say that the age of bronze metallurgy(dare I call it a Bronze Age) within a society has ended and now the new metal, say iron, being worked is now the dominant metal(dare I call it an Iron Age).

"Insert Metal Here" Age is used because it works. It succinctly tells a reader its meaning in simple words.

Being anal about literally everything because you thought you saw the vaguest shadow of racism provides nothing substantive towards furthering the field of history.

 

[Chloe Sullivan]

Weird stretch.

Age - the length of time that a person has lived or a thing has existed. Oxford Dictionary.

There comes a time when bronze is no longer the main metal being used by a society, so it is perfectly logical to say that the age of bronze metallurgy(dare I call it a Bronze Age) within a society has ended and now the new metal, say iron, being worked is now the dominant metal(dare I call it an Iron Age).

"Insert Metal Here" Age is used because it works. It succinctly tells a reader its meaning in simple words.

Being anal about literally everything because you thought you saw the vaguest shadow of racism provides nothing substantive towards furthering the field of history.

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This presumes that one metal dominates for a given age. Which may not actually be the case for all societies.

Like if you go google "bronze age" and check the encyclopedia definitions, you get

Bronze Age, third phase in the development of material culture among the ancient peoples of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, following the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods (Old Stone Age and New Stone Age, respectively).

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The Bronze Age (c. 3000-1000 BCE) is the period when cultures were either using, producing, or trading bronze. Several cultures flourished around the Aegean Sea during this period: the Minoan civilization on Crete, the Mycenaean civilization on mainland Greece, and the Cycladic culture on the Cyclades Islands..

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*note that this site doesn't even have en entry for just "bronze age" the above quote is from "Bronze Age Aegean"

Generally, the sources seem to be cagey about even applying the term bronze age at all outside of Eurasia.

A 'progression of metals' is not some sort of inherent truth of human societal development, it's history contingent on geography and other factors.

 

[Shane_357]

It's worth doing sometimes. Not always.

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This is one of them, as the mere idea that history and 'progress' follows a linear progression is baked into the terminology of 'Ages' and that linear progression is the principle on which the 'White Man's Burden' concept is founded. There are definitely situations where it's not worth the time, where a spade is just a spade; a simple rule of thumb is that if it involves classifying a society, ethnic group, cultural milieu, etc then tread fucking carefully.

Being anal about literally everything because you thought you saw the vaguest shadow of racism provides nothing substantive towards furthering the field of history.

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This just tells me you're not aware of the history of this and how it persists into the modern day and informs modern racism in many forms.

I would be sincerely interested to learn more about that.

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Right here.

 

[hydra1234]

Well, like I said, I'm not saying Diamond is the guy to go to for the answers, but I'm not mad about the question.

Asking "what touched off the sequence of events that led to this particular continent becoming weirdly able to reach out and dominate other continents" is not an unreasonable question. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying anything about the merits of Diamond's analysis.

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The point I'm making is that approaching history through asking a question and then retroactively looking for an answer without ever questioning the premise is a poor methodology, not just limited to Diamond. That's how Gobineau formulated his hypotheses about racial superiority ("How and why is a nation's vigour lost? How does it degenerate?"), how the Victorians blamed "decadence" for the fall of a variety of civilizations (basically the same question as Gobineau), how Daniken developed his ancient aliens hypothesis ("Is there any reason why we may not have 'competitors' on another planet who are equal or superior to us?"), and how we get insanely reductionist universal histories like Sapiens (How did Homo Sapiens become the dominant species on the planet?) or Salt: A World History (How did salt influence world history?).

Sure, questions can be interesting research primers, but they can also frame historical research in a way that already biases the conclusion.

 

[Simon_Jester]

Maybe.

I think, though, that constantly trying to circumlocute around the compact and memorable terms for ideas because someone used those terms as ammo for evil shit 50 or for that matter 150 years ago just results in us accidentally losing the war of ideas against people whose ideas are "simpler" in that they don't require memorizing the special password to get around the complex bad ideas of the past.

The point I'm making is that approaching history through asking a question and then retroactively looking for an answer without ever questioning the premise is a poor methodology, not just limited to Diamond. That's how Gobineau formulated his hypotheses about racial superiority ("How and why is a nation's vigour lost? How does it degenerate?"), how the Victorians blamed "decadence" for the fall of a variety of civilizations (basically the same question as Gobineau), how Daniken developed his ancient aliens hypothesis ("Is there any reason why we may not have 'competitors' on another planet who are equal or superior to us?"), and how we get insanely reductionist universal histories like Sapiens (How did Homo Sapiens become the dominant species on the planet?) or Salt: A World History (How did salt influence world history?).

Sure, questions can be interesting research primers, but they can also frame historical research in a way that already biases the conclusion.

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Well, in this case, the actual question is "was there some distinct factor that kicked off Europe's advantaged position and the Americas' disadvantaged position."

So questioning the premise would be, what, "no, there doesn't need to be, it was sheer fucking happenstance, it's doublewin mechanics that amplify an advantage all the way down, with no underlying cause and effect confering the advantage that gets amplified?"

 

[Chehrazad]

Being anal about literally everything because you thought you saw the vaguest shadow of racism provides nothing substantive towards furthering the field of history.

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The three-age system was not invented to be generally applicable to the Americas. If you want to talk about substantively furthering the field of history, then you should absolutely not be talking about applying it to the Aztec Empire. I don't feel super happy with this discussion, because talking in detail about a word choice Simon basically just chose on a lark because it was convenient isn't super comfortable, but no serious historian worth their salt would describe the Aztec Empire as "bronze age" and citing dictionary definitions as if the three-age system does not have a deeper history itself will do you no favours here.

 

[Shane_357]

Maybe.

I think, though, that constantly trying to circumlocute around the compact and memorable terms for ideas because someone used those terms as ammo for evil shit 50 or for that matter 150 years ago just results in us accidentally losing the war of ideas against people whose ideas are "simpler" in that they don't require memorizing the special password to get around the complex bad ideas of the past.

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Yes and in politics that's a real issue that is outright destroying the ability to confront the right. This is not that; this is a form of racism that exists right now. Considering certain peoples (especially First Nations) as 'primitive' and 'backwards' is way too fucking common right now.

 

[Love Train]

Weird stretch.

Age - the length of time that a person has lived or a thing has existed. Oxford Dictionary.

There comes a time when bronze is no longer the main metal being used by a society, so it is perfectly logical to say that the age of bronze metallurgy(dare I call it a Bronze Age) within a society has ended and now the new metal, say iron, being worked is now the dominant metal(dare I call it an Iron Age).

"Insert Metal Here" Age is used because it works. It succinctly tells a reader its meaning in simple words.

Being anal about literally everything because you thought you saw the vaguest shadow of racism provides nothing substantive towards furthering the field of history.

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I love continuing to live in the Iron Age in 2024, this seems like a useful definition for delineating historical periods

 

[hydra1234]

Well, in this case, the actual question is "was there some distinct factor that kicked off Europe's advantaged position and the Americas' disadvantaged position."

So questioning the premise would be, what, "no, there doesn't need to be, it was sheer fucking happenstance, it's doublewin mechanics that amplify an advantage all the way down, with no underlying cause and effect confering the advantage that gets amplified?"

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First, the "actual question" is already a drastically distinct one from Yali's question that Diamond dedicates an entire chapter to framing as the motivating question of GG&S.

Secondly, I'm not saying wholesale rejecting the premise is the ideal methodological approach either. If anything, rejecting the premise is just answering a different question. Taking your question for instance, the assumption here is that there is a unique advantage that Europe possesses, and thus that advantage must be the reason behind the conquest of the Americas. In Diamond's case, he sees the most visible advantage being the titular guns, germs, and steel and thus assumes that the conquistadors must have conquered the Americas with those three advantages alone.

Better scholarship in this case is to simply not to have a "guiding question" in the first place, instead looking at the evidence without preconceptions that a guiding question can create to form a new theory or conclusion.

Continuing with the example of Diamond's guiding question, a more unbiased analysis looking at all kinds of conquests without assuming the existence of a continental advantage could see that many rising powers were able to exploit native diplomatic situations to play various existing factions off each other and gain native allies and thus conclude that the advantage Europe possessed in its conquest of the Americans was being an outside party to American diplomatic affairs, enabling them to easily gather native allies against local powers to facilitate their conquests. It still answers the question (even if it did not initially intend to) without making the set of faulty assumptions that results in Diamond rehashing an uncritical European narrative of the conquest of the Americas.

 

[Simon_Jester]

First, the "actual question" is already a drastically distinct one from Yali's question that Diamond dedicates an entire chapter to framing as the motivating question of GG&S.

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Only because it's the aftermath of a brushoff attempt. If the answer to the question "why these guys and not those guys" is "accumulation gained from looting the first group of those guys," for instance, then one has invited the question "so what made the looting possible in the first place?"

This is rather different from questions like "how does a race lose its vigor," which contain many baked-in assumptions about what 'race' and 'vigor' mean and thus have high potential to be pure nonsense. Here, I'm asking a fairly straightforward cause and effect question, based on well defined terms. "Unask the question, oh unenlightened one" doesn't feel like a good response. Scholarship should be able to answer cause and effect questions somehow, even if only by saying "it's complicated, pick eight of this list of twenty possible explanations."

Secondly, I'm not saying wholesale rejecting the premise is the ideal methodological approach either. If anything, rejecting the premise is just answering a different question. Taking your question for instance, the assumption here is that there is a unique advantage that Europe possesses, and thus that advantage must be the reason behind the conquest of the Americas. In Diamond's case, he sees the most visible advantage being the titular guns, germs, and steel and thus assumes that the conquistadors must have conquered the Americas with those three advantages alone.

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I think "alone" is a bit of a stretch, even when describing Diamond. If nothing else, we just had an argument over his take on the role of literacy. And horses are neither guns nor germs nor steel.

But even if he is limited to the idea that it was "those three advantages alone," I don't have to be, to still think the question itself has merit. The root cause or bundle of root causes could be something else. Any of many things else.

Continuing with the example of Diamond's guiding question, a more unbiased analysis looking at all kinds of conquests without assuming the existence of a continental advantage could see that many rising powers were able to exploit native diplomatic situations to play various existing factions off each other and gain native allies and thus conclude that the advantage Europe possessed in its conquest of the Americans was being an outside party to American diplomatic affairs, enabling them to easily gather native allies against local powers to facilitate their conquests. It still answers the question (even if it did not initially intend to) without making the set of faulty assumptions that results in Diamond rehashing an uncritical European narrative of the conquest of the Americas.

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I don't think that really does a better job of linking cause to effect. It feels like just another flavor of just-so story, and one that does if anything less to single out the 'why' behind all this.

Because "being an outsider to local affairs" is hardly unique to this one group trying to break into that one area at one time. It should be making things easy for so many other groups to casually conquer regions back and forth in all sorts of directions. It's certainly a contributing factor, but as a primary factor, let alone a sole factor, I almost feel like... I'm not sure I can find a way to describe it. But it really sounds like a bad explanation to make the primary one.

 

[Chloe Sullivan]

Because "being an outsider to local affairs" is hardly unique to this one group trying to break into that one area at one time. It should be making things easy for so many other groups to casually conquer regions back and forth in all sorts of directions. It's certainly a contributing factor, but as a primary factor, let alone a sole factor, I almost feel like... I'm not sure I can find a way to describe it. But it really sounds like a bad explanation to make the primary one.

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I don't think @hydra1234 was arguing for sole factor. I don't think "sole factor" is a useful concept in anything as complex as history.

And even "primary factor" is suspect at best. Perhaps we should simply stick to "factors," and acknowledge that some are plausible - fitting the known facts and making logical sense, and other not so plausible.

Outsider Advantage does appear to be a thing. I don't think it ever causes or explains anything on it's own. In this thread, I believe there have been several other theories/factors put forward - I suggested mobility/transportation (although @bookwyrm kinda did it first), as well as the "secure retreat" concept. The argument is not that "outsider" is primary, it is that it is more plausible than literacy, which is a theory with multiple problems.



The criticism of Diamond's presentation come at at least two lines:

1) That he is not doing responsible Academia - that he fails to cite sources, that he fails consider alternative sources originating outside of the European sphere, that he attributes explanatory power to concepts that don't entirely line up either factually or logically once you delve into those alternative sources (or perhaps even fail prima facie when stripped down to their core argument instead of slipped in as part of a well written semi-narrative).

2) That he is not doing responsible Creation - a writer should put some effort into considering the consequences of their words and what sort of thing those words promote. The literacy explanation/factor/argument kinda does play into Euro-chauvinist narratives about the primitiveness of the Mesoamericans, as does the emphasis on steel (see all the notes about how the indigenous peoples of the americas did know how to work metal quite well, and in many situations cloth or stone may have been the better solution, not inherently more "primitive" than use of metal). That Diamond does not approach these sort of fraught topics with more a critical stance or put much if any effort into understanding or even considering the viewpoints of the non-European peoples is also something that is problematic.

 

[hydra1234]

Only because it's the aftermath of a brushoff attempt. If the answer to the question "why these guys and not those guys" is "accumulation gained from looting the first group of those guys," for instance, then one has invited the question "so what made the looting possible in the first place?"

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"Why these guys and not those guys" is already a distortion of the original question that was solely about a difference in material conditions in the present.

Anyways, if the question has been reduced down to specifically about two cases of conquest in the Americas, "being a fluke" is no longer that implausible of a theory.

This is rather different from questions like "how does a race lose its vigor," which contain many baked-in assumptions about what 'race' and 'vigor' mean and thus have high potential to be pure nonsense. Here, I'm asking a fairly straightforward cause and effect question, based on well defined terms. "Unask the question, oh unenlightened one" doesn't feel like a good response. Scholarship should be able to answer cause and effect questions somehow, even if only by saying "it's complicated, pick eight of this list of twenty possible explanations."

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Being able to answer questions does not equal having to frame research around a question. An archaeological study on the Pyramids of Giza does not have to focus on the "did the aliens build the Pyramids?", but the results of the study discovering novel techniques of pyramid-building well within the technology of the Egyptians can easily answer "it's much more likely that Egyptians built these pyramids without external help."

Also, there are absolutely a ton of potential assumptions about "advantages" and "disadvantage," which are just as vague as "vigor" or "decadence."

I think "alone" is a bit of a stretch, even when describing Diamond. If nothing else, we just had an argument over his take on the role of literacy. And horses are neither guns nor germs nor steel.

But even if he is limited to the idea that it was "those three advantages alone," I don't have to be, to still think the question itself has merit. The root cause or bundle of root causes could be something else. Any of many things else.

I don't think that really does a better job of linking cause to effect. It feels like just another flavor of just-so story, and one that does if anything less to single out the 'why' behind all this.

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My intention was to provide an example. In hindsight, I should have worded it better, but I wasn't trying to develop an alternative answer to GG&S in a single paragraph or rehash entire papers worth of GG&S critiques.

My point about Diamond is that the question centering around "advantages" led him to considering only the most obvious advantages primarily in the form of more advanced technologies, including guns, germs, and steel, but also horses and literacy (specifically in regards to knowledge).

I also am not trying to say the "outside context" was the only factor either, rather that it was an important one, and that an unbiased consideration resulted in a more holistic view that accounted for the decisive role native allies played in the conquest.

It should be making things easy for so many other groups to casually conquer regions back and forth in all sorts of directions

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That's exactly what happened. Look at how empires, dynasties, and territories have been in constant flux and how often new powers have been able to rise across the entire world, often by upending an existing diplomatic status quo, or the many cases of mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries gaining substantial political power.

Even the colonial empires fell victim to this with many independence movements successfully courting continental rivals to provide crucial foreign support that enabled them to win independence.

 

[stormbringer951]

There's actually an excellent essay about Mesoamerican bronze workers on this very website that touches on the trade network between Mexico and South America iirc.

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It also touches on, very relevantly for current discussions in this thread, the idea of the three ages model, what it is for and why it's hard to fit into some different contexts:

Popular culture considers the "Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages" to be part of some global, universal, tier-based level of "steps" a civilization takes to become "advanced". That's not how most archaeohistorians use it (at least, not since the death of unilineal evolution): the three-age system is a periodization, and one of many different ones used around the world. We like to name historical periods after something that exemplifies it, even though it might not be the cause of that particular era. Art styles are usually pretty good chronological diagnostics. Good ol' 3A isn't really global: it's mostly focused on periodizing Europe and western Asia (but I repeat myself), because the two eras of metal adoption track pretty well with major trends in trade networks, economies, cultures etc. Outside of that region, it gets progressively…messier. Even in Egypt it doesn't get used often, but once you get to East Asia things really don't mesh well for metals tracking with social eras,⁽⁸⁴⁾⁽⁸⁵⁾ making the "Chinese Bronze Age" more of a shorthand than an actual chronological description (used even less by Chinese archaeohistorians), and "Iron Age China" essentially never used because they didn't go through the same kind of revolutionary transition as western Eurasia. And Africa? Forget about it: they developed ironworking before bronze and probably before Eurasia did too.⁽⁸⁶⁾ Then you've got the Americas, which has thousands of years of rich history and cultural evolution with barely any correlation to tool material. Hence, today's scholars try not to rank the entirety of a culture's complexity by what they used to stab people.

And not only does the three-age system periodize a region instead of the whole planet, it only covers the eras before historiography in that region (though that gets complicated). Despite making and using iron as their main tool and fighting material, neither the Romans nor medieval Europeans were Iron Age societies.

What all that means is even if the Aztecs were churning out bronze like an assembly line and using it for tools, weapons, armor, houses, pillows, diapers, zeppelin airframes, etc. they wouldn't be "a Bronze Age society" because they weren't a part of Eurasia from 3200 - 1000 BC.

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[BalerionTheDrake]

I love continuing to live in the Iron Age in 2024, this seems like a useful definition for delineating historical periods

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Clearly we live in the Plastic Age.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think @hydra1234 was arguing for sole factor. I don't think "sole factor" is a useful concept in anything as complex as history.

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Hydra's wording suggested "this one thing I'm talking about is the sole factor" as strongly or more strongly than Diamond's book suggests "firearms, infectious diseases, and steel" as the only three. Hydra drew the conclusion "Diamond thinks these are the only three." Hydra used the exact words "those three advantages alone" even when we just got done, bare hours ago, talking about other things Diamond claimed were advantages (rightly or wrongly). Then Hydra turned around and at least loosely implied that one advantage in particular (a different one) was the only one worth talking about.

Diamond did a bad job. But if we're going to keep busting his chops about things, it behooves us to do better. Or at least, it behooves us to avoid stepping on the exact same rake he did, that we just got done calling him out for stepping on five minutes ago.

If he's expected to be very, very cautious in saying "X caused Y" to avoid the implication that X was the sole cause of Y, then we should be laboring under the same expectation to at least some level.

Now, he does clarify this in a later post! There's that, and that's a good thing.

Outsider Advantage does appear to be a thing. I don't think it ever causes or explains anything on it's own. In this thread, I believe there have been several other theories/factors put forward - I suggested mobility/transportation (although @bookwyrm kinda did it first), as well as the "secure retreat" concept. The argument is not that "outsider" is primary, it is that it is more plausible than literacy, which is a theory with multiple problems.

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"Outsider" is not competing with "literacy," and while I do not bear Hydra any ill will, neither do I wish to give them credit for things other people said.

Now, if you are simply observing that many of us, collectively, have come up with many separate contributing factors affecting the ability of Europeans to conquer the Americas, that's true! Some of those factors are in Diamond's own list (he wasn't wrong about gunpowder or horses helping), and others, as I recall, are not! It's perfectly true that there's a long list of factors that we can find, and look at, and talk about the ways in which they contributed. To be clear, I'm not arguing with that, and I'm certainly not arguing that the list involves a lot more subtlety and awareness of external facts than Diamond shows.

Because your two headings of "criticism of DIamond's presentation" is substantiatively correct. Diamond overlooks a lot of things that a person trying to do good scholarly work should do, or at least consult a co-author on. Diamond also does things that can only be called unreflective. As you point out, even if (for instance) Diamond genuinely believes that having steel tools available is a big advantage, and even if he has reason to do so, one has to have a certain sense of caution and awareness about why this might be an advantage and to what extent, or one may give future critics the impression that one is just mindlessly chortling to oneself about how 'those primitives don't even know iron hur hur hur.'

"Why these guys and not those guys" is already a distortion of the original question that was solely about a difference in material conditions in the present.

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On the other hand, it's a distortion Diamond created, not me. And above that...

One can criticize Diamond as having not really addressed his friend's question (he'd have had to write a long tract about the sociology of colonialism in periods well after the 1500s). One can argue that he's a bad friend to his 'friend' who asked him this question, which he then took and answered a question largely unrelated and not of the greatest direct importance.

But the question itself, "why these guys and not those guys," is not a bad question in and of itself. And even if it were, it remains an important question worth at least trying to look at and talk about, if only to deconstruct it properly. Because if the question itself were that flawed, well, it remains a question that is asked often enough by enough people to force a place for itself in the history of historical inquiry, if not in the body of inquiry itself.

As an example of this, the reason we still talk about 19th century ethnographers who rambled about "how a race loses its vigor" is precisely because we are trying to combat that idea. We cannot do that without understanding the idea and exactly what is wrong with its premises. Which requires closely examining it, not just shrugging and walking away from it entirely.

And when we look at this kind of 'central question' that is genuinely capable of sparking interest and it turns out not to be an inherently fallacious question, then surely it is even more important to be able to engage with it.

So while it is true that Diamond distorted the original quotation he attributed to his friend, in order to craft the question he wanted to write a book about, the question he wrote the book about is still a question of valid interest and discussion.

But call him a bad friend if you like.

Anyways, if the question has been reduced down to specifically about two cases of conquest in the Americas, "being a fluke" is no longer that implausible of a theory.

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But I wasn't the one who did that reduction. Europeans conquered large areas outside the Aztec and Inca empires, and importantly were able to maintain their conquests with very little interruption and very few instances of being pushed back out of territory once claimed, despite operating at considerable logistical disadvantages in many cases. In the Americas this lasted long enough to permit the triumph of settler colonialism, and in Africa and Eurasia it lasted until the 'decolonialist' period of the mid-20th century, at which point the world was a very different place from what it was in the period sometimes loosely called the Age of Exploration or the Age of Colonialism.

The fall of Tenochtitlan and Cuzco are examples of the trend, not flukes.

Also, there are absolutely a ton of potential assumptions about "advantages" and "disadvantage," which are just as vague as "vigor" or "decadence."

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Would you care to list some of these assumptions, so we can see whether they are assumptions consistently made in the discussion, as opposed to being sort of vaguely projected on Group X by people who disagree with Group X?

Because there are also, I have seen, a lot of ways to create spurious clouds of objections that might be valid in theory but are not fairly and truthfully applied to the world in practice.

I would say more, but spaghetti rules limit the number of separate things I quote and I try to honor that. I'll hopefully come back to the rest of your post later.

 

[The Zombie]

Much as Germany managed some clever innovations and great designs, the Wunderwaffen meme / mythos surrounding German mechanised warfare / design / tank warfare is one that really needs to die a death. Their tank strategy / tactics were definitely effective, and helped contribute to some of their early successes in Europe, but considering the limited resources and scarcity they were facing, they were incredibly wasteful with what they had and spent too much time screwing around with production / engineering designs instead of sticking to a consistent-but-working setup.

Perhaps there is another timeline where the Germans managed to hit Baku and secure a reliable supply of oil for their war machine, but instead what we got was a state that could apply the afterburners (metaphorically speaking) in the form of mass tank offensives early on before being forced to rely on their non-mechanised components ie mules, horses etc. And unlike Britain and France, who learned from their mistakes earlier in the war where Germany mass-deployed tanks with radios which, individually had inferior designs in some instances compared to their French counterparts but had the benefit of attacking in strength and being equipped with radios, Germany simply couldn't keep up these offensives because they didn't have the resources to sustain them.

I'll give an example, the Ferdinand Tank / Elefant, a heavy tank destroyer.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx2-jLNHdzY

TL;DR - during the bid between Henschel and Porsche for the Tiger tank, Porsche offered a bid with a complex dual petrol-electric transmission engine setup that never made the cut. Porsche were so confident that they had x100 of these proto-Tiger chassis built, which then forced the military to make a call on whether to scrap or repurpose them. They instead repurposed them into heavy tank destroyers, where they suffered a large number of mechanical failures due to the complexity of the engine, the terrain they were deployed in and the lack of close support against infrantry / lighter vehicles. Because they were so heavy, they couldn't easily be towed, and later when redeployed to Italy as the Elefant they fared no better off.

Potential History also made a fairly good video covering this general area, highly recommend giving his channel a watch:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyFk-Fo6HUo

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-7yG1yHzE

Also, a more generic / political opinion take on conservatism v. progressivism across history:

The way I view things, human history is a long chain of progression against conservatism with some speedbumps along the way. 600-900 years ago, feudalism (and all the horrible things with it) and religious fundamentalism (the crusades, burning of jews/heretics, suppression of knowledge by the church etc) was the norm. 150-250 years ago, slavery, imperialism and disenfranchisement etc was considered the norm. 70 years ago, open bigotry (based on race, gender or sexuality) was the norm. Now it isn't so much, but there are some parts of the human species that are still behind - and I felt that they needed to be dragged into the light of day whether they liked it or not, and either confirm or get ground under the boots of human history like every other 'anti-progressive' that came before them.

Looking at some more conservative / fundamentalist areas in the world (thinking Afghanistan as an example) - I'm not going to defend the rights of fundamentalists to riot and lynch people because of some alleged slight on a millenia+ old religious text, or because their society doesn't tolerate independence outside the existing social structures. That said, I do not defend attacking people for who they are, only those that actually cause harm to others.

Under Taliban rule you had women being forced to stay in their homes unless accompanied by a. Male, no matter what. What's that? You don't have family/your last male relative died? Well tough shit. These women weren't allowed to work, or even leave to provide for themselves so many were rendered destitute and forced to resort to begging which got them beaten by the bastards. So to get out, girls had to be disguised as boys so they could work or even just leave the house for supplies. Either that, oe be married off to (usually) older men - and fuck cultural dissonance, any of these bastards who get off on fucking a child of 11-14 years are without a doubt degenerates.

Bath houses were shut which was how a lot of Afghan women were able to bathe and considering the environment they were in, that meant fuck all sanitation. Ironic, considering how much the Islamic faith emphasises good hygiene but again you're talking about culture more than faith. And because midwives disappeared and women were sequestered, combined with poor sanitation, that meant higher infant mortality rates. And of course, no female students or teachers so education took a nose dive.

Ironically, the name 'Taliban' derives from 'talib' which is an Arabic phrase for 'student' yet these people with the application of their 'laws' are some of the dumbest fucks I've seen. Even the fucking Islamic State had more sense than that and that's saying something when you're talking about a pale imitation of a theocratic state not seen since the dark ages.

Fundamentalists as a whole are fucking idiots anyhow, who will use anything as an excuse to behave like feral beasts under the thinly veiled guise of 'piety'. Just accuse someone of wiping their arse with the Qu'ran and they'll descend into lunacy, it'd be almost funny if it didn't cost people their lives.

 

[hydra1234]

Diamond did a bad job. But if we're going to keep busting his chops about ttarge areas outside the Aztec and Inca empires, and importantly were able to maintain their conquests with very little interruption and very few instances of being pushed back out of territory once claimed, despite operating at considerable logistical disadvantages in many cases. In the Americas this lasted long enough to permit the triumph of settler colonialism, and in Africa and Eurasia it lasted until the 'decolonialist' period of the mid-20th century, at which point the world was a very different place from what it was in the period sometimes loosely called the Age of Exploration or the Age of Colonialism.

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You just said it yourself earlier, people make the argument that it was "accumulation gained from looting the first group of those guys."

Spain didn't control every single inch of Americas after Cortes and Pizarro, but they gained access to the gold and silver mines and reserves of the two largest empires whose wealth then disseminated across Europe via the exorbitant spending of the Spanish Empire and trade. That amount of capital enabled the development of advanced capitalistic ideas (stock and commodity exchanges, for instance, popped up first in the Low Countries because they were the gateway between Spain) and provided wealth for Europeans to jump ahead of everybody else technologically and militarily and fund even more lavish expeditions across the world.

I've also heard the argument that Hispaniola and the Canary Islands were vital to refining Spanish tactics and overall colonization strategy, so there are even more reductionist arguments that could pin the whole thing on the conquest of a handful of even smaller entities than the Inca and the Aztecs.

But the question itself, "why these guys and not those guys," is not a bad question in and of itself. And even if it were, it remains an important question worth at least trying to look at and talk about, if only to deconstruct it properly. Because if the question itself were that flawed, well, it remains a question that is asked often enough by enough people to force a place for itself in the history of historical inquiry, if not in the body of inquiry itself.

As an example of this, the reason we still talk about 19th century ethnographers who rambled about "how a race loses its vigor" is precisely because we are trying to combat that idea. We cannot do that without understanding the idea and exactly what is wrong with its premises. Which requires closely examining it, not just shrugging and walking away from it entirely.

And when we look at this kind of 'central question' that is genuinely capable of sparking interest and it turns out not to be an inherently fallacious question, then surely it is even more important to be able to engage with it.

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Again, answering a question != framing research around a "central question."

Good scholarship would first collect evidence without a set of assumptions intentionally or unintentionally affecting evidence collection, and then derive a conclusion that can answer a question afterwards.

Sure, Gobineau's driving question about racial vigor is much more problematic than Yali's question (or Diamond's reframed question for that matter), but plenty of other valid questions such as "How did Homo Sapiens become the dominant species on Earth?", "How important was salt in human history", or "Why do so many empires fall?" have also resulted in faulty "big" histories.

Would you care to list some of these assumptions, so we can see whether they are assumptions consistently made in the discussion, as opposed to being sort of vaguely projected on Group X by people who disagree with Group X?

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Sure. The primary assumption is that "advantages" existing on the mainland must have translated into conquest advantages in the Americas. Spain had guns, steel, horses, and writing, so those must have translated into advantages elsewhere.

Also, the existence of various advantages in the first place. There's a lot of post-hoc reasoning that Cortes and Pizarro were "great" or "superior" men enabling conquest, and a large assumption that the Native Americans were behind technologically, in a linear model of technological progress (not talking about specific areas like military technology, moreso a general conception of technology). And of course, the preceding explanations prior to Diamond declared race, culture, and/or religion to be advantages.

Matthew Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest evidentially demonstrates these assumptions (and some others) are prevalent enough to write a whole book debunking them.

In addition, the broader question has a teleological assumption (X happened, so X must be inevitable or the result of a systematic cause/set of advantages), which is why people have gravitated towards some sort of deterministic explanation, whether its race, culture, or geography.

 

[Chloe Sullivan]

The way I view things, human history is a long chain of progression against conservatism with some speedbumps along the way.

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this page is full of people explaining that history does not work that way.

 

[Andrensath]

this page is full of people explaining that history does not work that way.

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Yes, but have you considered that Whig Historiography is a way to make it's adherents feel better?

 

[Simon_Jester]

That's exactly what happened. Look at how empires, dynasties, and territories have been in constant flux and how often new powers have been able to rise across the entire world, often by upending an existing diplomatic status quo, or the many cases of mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries gaining substantial political power.

Even the colonial empires fell victim to this with many independence movements successfully courting continental rivals to provide crucial foreign support that enabled them to win independence.

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The thing that bothers me about this is that anyone from a distant land is an outsider to local politics, but we don't constantly see the world as a crazy quilt of patchwork polities founded easily by people from Over Here casually conquering big chunks of Over There, while being unable to conquer Over Here because they're not outsiders to local politics.

Just about the only period of history where the world started to look like that was the age of colonialism, even though "being an outsider to local politics" is not a new phenomenon unique to that period. Instead, empires tend to be relatively continguous. Conquering your neighbors is often though not always easier than conquering distant foreigners.

If there's such a thing as an 'advantage' that is capable of cause-and-effect connections or at least correlations, if military victories and conquests aren't just random, then when something is an advantage you'd expect it to rarely be "upset." As a tongue-in-cheek example, we know that having your country come first in alphabetical order is not a significant military advantage, because such countries do lose a reasonable proportion of their wars.

When we apply this logic to "has gunpowder weapons," we find that it's fairly rare for a society that has no such weapons to defeat a society that does have them... unless you are the Mongols. Whereas societies with guns tend to win a very large fraction of their wars against those without, suggesting that "having guns" is a significant advantage, or is very strongly correlated with something else that is. Obviously no one advantage is decisive in isolation all the time or even most of the time, but we can still look at things this way.

The question then becomes "is being an outsider to local politics an advantage, or do we just not notice all the hypothetical conquest attempts that failed or were not tried because the attacker would have been an outsider?"

Being an outsider is clearly an advantage sometimes... if you know how to take advantage and if you're walking into the right situation. I'd argue that it's a lot more of an advantage when mixed with something else, something that gives you something the local population doesn't have, something 'marketable' if you will. Such as an exceptional type of weapon or the ability to freely reposition using ships, or such as the local population's political system being heavily disrupted by a war or outbreak of disease... which may be one that your side has indirectly caused.

You just said it yourself earlier, people make the argument that it was "accumulation gained from looting the first group of those guys."

Spain didn't control every single inch of Americas after Cortes and Pizarro, but they gained access to the gold and silver mines and reserves of the two largest empires whose wealth then disseminated across Europe via the exorbitant spending of the Spanish Empire and trade. That amount of capital enabled the development of advanced capitalistic ideas (stock and commodity exchanges, for instance, popped up first in the Low Countries because they were the gateway between Spain) and provided wealth for Europeans to jump ahead of everybody else technologically and militarily and fund even more lavish expeditions across the world.

I've also heard the argument that Hispaniola and the Canary Islands were vital to refining Spanish tactics and overall colonization strategy, so there are even more reductionist arguments that could pin the whole thing on the conquest of a handful of even smaller entities than the Inca and the Aztecs.

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The problem then is that this circles back to "what made it possible to conquer Hispaniola and Cuba," and you still end up asking the question. Ships certainly wind up playing a huge role, for starters, I agree. And also "why did two out of two major empires fall to the first couple of expeditions to hit them," which in turn suggests something a bit odd is going on. Most empires do not collapse just because a few hundred well armed bandits show up in a border province; something rather more serious has to be going on. And in the Aztec and Inca empires something was going on... namely the disease outbreaks and internal conflict that came with them.

The response to "why do things happen" isn't "stop asking why things happen."

Again, answering a question != framing research around a "central question."

Good scholarship would first collect evidence without a set of assumptions intentionally or unintentionally affecting evidence collection, and then derive a conclusion that can answer a question afterwards.

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Okay, but the question then becomes "can scholars answer a question intelligibly," and if the answer is 'no,' then scholars will consistently find themselves being sidelined in favor of pseudo-scholars who are willing to try. The average layman sees "ability to answer comprehensible questions" as one of the big things it's worth keeping scholars around for, especially in the humanities.

So I'd caution against trying too hard to shut down 'central questions.' There's a need to do one's research first so as to be able to contextualize the question properly, but the question itself is still a target once one has acquired useful knowledge.

Yes, but have you considered that Whig Historiography is a way to make it's adherents feel better?

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Personally, I see it as a way to try and derive an "ought" from all the observable "is" of history. Given that the "ought" conclusion of Whig historians isn't all that bad, I find it hard to condemn them.

One may argue that thinking history is just a succession of events that happen for no reason and where no trends can be discerned is not necessarily better, or even better at serving truth, than thinking that history follows certain courses for recognizable reasons and involves a great struggle to make things gradually better for everyone, against powerful and often ruthless opposition.